Tag Archives: Rational

A couple of small IBM Software announcements, depending on your point of view 🙂

WebSphere Application Server version 8.0 is now available to try out as an alpha version. This was announced over on the WebSphere Community Blog a couple of weeks ago (a blog worth following, if you are into WebSphere). Key parts of JEE 6.0 are showing up, and there are new security and governance features, as well as a simplified install. Check it out.

Rational Software Architect is now available as an open beta. This is billed as offering “a simpler, more streamlined way to design, develop, deploy, and test IT solutions”.

I’ve been heading to Vegas on a regular basis for the past few years, but it has always been for internal events rather than customer ones. In my role, I’ve always been excited by technology and the innovation we get up to internally – but much, much more importantly, I need to be talking to customers and partners to understand how that technology and innovation is being used in the real world. I’m very much looking forward to talking to WebSphere and other IBM customers about their experiences with our products, what they are looking for from Service Oriented Architectures, and taking those messages back into our labs.

For the final morning of the conference, I attended a talk on Jazz by Scott Rich. It was another talk with a live demo – very cool to see the technology actually running.

Jazz is an extensible and scalable collaboration platform for the development cycle. It has a client/server architecture and runs on either an open source stack of Tomcat + Derby + Jabber, or an IBM one (potentially others I suppose, but that’s sheer speculation).

The demo was extremely neat. Again, this is building REST, RSS/Atom, a rich web UI (as well as the Eclipse one) into the platform. I can’t say too much at this stage, but it would be worth getting involved in the Jazz community site if you want to know more.

Do I sound excited about it? It looked great. I can’t wait to see this start to appear in the open.

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I didn’t get the chance to sit through this introductory talk in full, but I did jot a few notes down. I haven’t been able to use RAD v7 yet – these notes are probably not news to most people, but they were of interest to me.

Due to various improvements, RAD 7 has better size and performance characteristics than 6. It is based on Eclipse 3.2.1 running on JDK 5.

The Web Diagram view has been completely redesigned and enhanced.

Ajax is supported inasmuch as the JSF components have Ajax behaviours and do not force page reloads. Graphical portlet development is supported.